Kingdom of Needle and Bone by Mira Grant

Author:Mira Grant [Grant, Mira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mira Grant, Horror, virology, female protagonist, medicine, near future
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2018-12-23T06:00:00+00:00

5.

They stayed close enough to the coast to play peekaboo with the trees. The hours melted into night, until everyone retreated to their cabins to sleep. Mark passed out cold, face down on the pillow, and dreamt of saving the world. Sandy slept fitfully, waking around midnight to pray—a habit she’d almost broken—before closing her eyes again.

Izzy checked her notes, and when that was done, she checked them again, and when that was done she checked them for the third time, watching the way the data clicked together like the vertebrae of a healthy spine, each piece leading inevitably and inexorably to the next. When she realized that she was midway through the fourth review and couldn’t remember anything since the end of the third, she closed her laptop and finally slept.

She woke to the awareness that the ship had stopped moving. Rising quickly, she pulled on a sweater, stepped into her shoes, and made her way to the deck. Sandy, who had always been an early riser, was already there, hands gripping the rail, eyes fixed on the island in front of them. Izzy stepped up beside her, too busy staring to say a word.

The Canadian coast was the perfect backdrop to make the scene in front of them unbelievably strange. Pristine evergreens stretched as far as the eye could see, turned into a surreal painting by distance and the sheer amount of construction equipment currently packed onto an island no more than six miles long and two miles across. A ferry port had already taken form; a crew was painting it in shades of olive and brown, making it harder to spot from a distance. Another crew was laying down the concrete to anchor the fence posts. The island they’d settled on wasn’t a wildlife preserve—not like the American island she had originally tried to obtain—but there were still migratory seabirds that came here to roost, and it had been decided that it would benefit the island’s eventual inhabitants if they could enjoy the beauty of the natural world while in their open-ended isolation.

Buildings were taking shape all across the island, a small community springing up where none had previously existed. It wasn’t beautiful, not yet: it was too busy becoming functional to waste time on beauty. But Izzy could look at the bones of their community-to-be and see where the beauty would go, see the spaces being left open for small parks, see the places where the structures had been left that tiny bit more open than they needed to be for the sake of fitting some pleasing flourish or enhancement into the gaps.

“It’s all real,” breathed Sandy, casting a sidelong glance at Izzy. “Everything you said is real. We’re doing this. We’re actually doing this.”

“We are,” Izzy confirmed. Her eyes never left the island. “We can’t take enough to be anything more than a stop-gap measure, but we can save a lot of lives while we’re fighting the fires.” She had hopes, as yet unvoiced, that

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